


seek for something new

by eudaimon



Category: War Boys (2009)
Genre: M/M, Post canon, border stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-19
Updated: 2011-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-27 13:56:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After everything that happened, George and David couldn't stay.  They followed the border south and Cat heard from them from time to time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	seek for something new

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PJVilar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PJVilar/gifts).



> A story of what comes next. Happy Yuletide, darling girl <3

all the masters say to make it up another way  
like just to live is not enough  
and I think we get there in the end  
\- ERICA DREISBACK

 

Long story short: that they live, if not _happily_ , then for a long time. And together.

*

The first letter arrives on a Tuesday, in the dusty Spring. She sits on the trailer steps and holds it in her hands. On that day, her particular treasures are a plastic soldier and a paper flower and a star made out of cracked mirror tile. She's a few years shy of outgrowing that particular habit, and so they sit lined up on the sun-warmed step beside her as she weighs it across the wdith of both palms. Sometimes, she dreams of them - always together, side by side and running, barrelling across the sand, not hard-packed desert sand but soft and white and the sea over their shoulders and the tide like a beating heart.

How she likes to remember them: that, when she was little, David used to carry her, but it took much longer before George would sit close to her, his shoulder touching hers. How, sometimes, it was like having two brothers and how it came as no surprise to her when it turned out that they shared a heart. Because it must be like sharing a heart, loving someone else like they love each other. She likes to think that that's what true love always feels like.

"Come inside now, darling," calls her mom, but Cat's going to linger for a few more moments with the letter and David's handwriting, like a whisper in her ear.

*

Borders, he knows, are a human construct. From space, the Earth is whole and wide open. In the darkness, America bleeds light. From above, the cities look like beating hearts, many ventricled and off-centre. America feels too much to have only one.

David lies in bed and imagines how small and unimportant they are in the grand scheme of things. Yes, they fucked up (maybe they were always wicked, always had that in them, and should have ben drowned at birth like cats). But he can't believe that. Won't. And he won't be put down as a victim of circumstances, either, not when he's a product of his mistakes as much of his choices. The scar is pink and puckered low on his belly. For a while, now, he's had a feeling that a body can be all scar and that the places where it's still sensitive are the places where it's not quite healed. Some days, he feels like he's hardened completely, a husk, emptied out by too much feeling, but then George comes home and gets into bed, freshly showered, and David feels the slow process of opening begin. Because they can be whole, here.

They can be healed because they are young and inventing something new and bold.  
Being in love with George lies along a border and David criss-crosses many times a day.

Healing is a slow process. George wraps his arm around David, pulls him closer, and David thinks that, maybe, the heat that pours off both of them is a good thing. Healthy. Like pain is a thing that can be sweat out. Inside, things are different. He's a kidney short, but his body found a way to mend. There was a time when he couldn't do a thing for himself; weakness had figured out a way into his bones. Still, he got better. He still vomits, sometimes, has days when he's weak and weary but he thinks that, maybe, those things come from a place that will never quite heal. There's a price that he's got to pay. There are amends that he must make. That he will never quite be as strong as he was when he was younger, before everything went to shit.

He remembers reading it in a play, once.  
Shit happens, and you find ways to live past hope.

On his side, he finds himself trying to learn George by touch. He reaches out and brushes his fingers against the bridge of his nose and his lips. They've known each other since they were eight, first said _I love you, man_ around the age of twelve. Puberty was when emotion became palpable for David, like a small, solid thing that he could feel on his tongue. Like a pill that he swallowed. He remembers thinking it over and over on that night when they lay entangled in his bed, skinny arms and skinned knees and David's pulse in the palm of his hand, his hard-on and his too quick orgasm, fourteen years old and pure of heart. _I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you_

He finds it amazing, how everything changed while he wasn't looking. And suddenly he's allowed to say it aloud.  
He doesn't know where the lines are drawn any more because George swept them all away, but he suspects that there's a dividing line there, running not between them but somehow through.

*

He spends a lot of time in pyjamas. He's not sure whether the t-shirts belong to him or George anymore. He puts on shoes to drive to the store where he pads around with a basket that he fills with snack food, soda and candy, peanut butter and chocolate. George brings home to proper groceries. They both ignore the liquor. Down here, near the gulf, they're roughly eight hundred miles from where they started. At the counter, nobody looks at him twice. His card is accepted without question. Nobody knows him anymore.

Nobody except George.  
But wasn't that always the way?

It's both liberating and comforting at the same time.

Driving down here, following the border, he stretched out full length in the backseat of the car and watched the clouds chase across a shard of blue sky. He'd been mostly healed. George drove and David slipped in and out of sleep for what felt like a long time.

The house isn't much. Out on the very edge of town, it faces towards the water and South Padre Island. He thought about finishing his degree, getting a job in a law office, driving to work and at least pretending to be what his father wanted him to be but then George was working construction and David decided _fuck it_. He doesn't know when he'll even speak to his dad again. Nobody knows them at home anymore, either. Which made it easier to walk into a coffee shop on San Padre and get a job. He wears jeans and t-shirts and Converse with a hole in one toe. He's terrible at sandwiches but makes a pretty fucking awesome cappuccino. He flirts with the pretty girls who come in with salt-water drying in their hair and on their eyelashes but, really, his heart's not in it. Sometimes, George comes in for lunch and they sit together at a table, not talking, not really but, under the table, George's fingertips play with the edge of his apron.

It's enough.

Slowly but surely, they're fixing up the house. George does the big stuff; he shores up walls and rewires, emerges from the crawl-space scuffed and dusty. David sits cross-legged on the bare boards in the lounge and paints the baseboards with the World Service on in the background. George showers first and David sits on the toilet and watches him until he can't resist it any longer, sliding his thumbs under the waistband of his pyjama pants, easing elastic down over his half-hard dick. George's back is broad but David's a little taller and they lean together like that, under the full flow of the water, against a wall that's only half-tiled.

"The damp's going to get into the plaster," mutters George as David's sinking down onto his knees. He just kneels there, his nose pressed into damp skin and hair, and it's like he can feel himself knitting together. Like he can figure out how they can do this. He curls his fingers around George's hard-on and strokes, years more confident than he was the first time he touched George's dick.

"Fuck the plaster," he says, and he slides his mouth down as George lifts his hips.  
And neither of them saying anything else.

*

The wind blows the storm in off the water and it beats down on the house. The power goes off during dinner and the food goes cold while they're fumbling around lighting candles. David burns his fingers, curses and stuffs them in his mouth.

"Be fucking careful," snaps George. David stands and stares at him for a moment.

"It's just my fingers, George. Jesus."

"But it isn't, is it?" says George, hands on his hips in the strange, shifting light, and David can feel it building, an argument, the kind of argument that they can only sustain once every six months or a year because they say things they don't mean about things they can't fix. Things they can't change. Because they were wicked once, or stupid, and they made the wrong decision and everything went to shit so quickly and David's always going to bear the marks of that and George won't ever quite be able to let him shoulder all of the blame alone.

He goes to bed with his own aching fingers and a bruised heart. He listens to the small sounds that George makes, moving around in the other room. Through slitted eyes, he watches the small light diminish as George blows out the candle one by one. The mattress gives when George sits down. David listens to him unlacing his boots.

"You scare me more than anything else on the planet," says George, quietly. "Nobody. Nobody can fucking hurt me more than you. Sometimes, I don't feel like I can stand it, David. I don't know how I'm going to take it."  
"But you will," says David. "We both will."

He can't explain how, but he knows that they will. Because you don't wait for something for as long as he waited for George and give it up easily.  
You'd be torn limb from limb before you let it go.

*

They know each other so well but there's still more to learn. For example, David knows that George's favourite X-Man is Nightcrawler, that his favourite soda is Mountain Dew, that his favourite flavour of ice-cream is double chocolate but what he hasn't necessarily thought about is that George might _really_ like being blindfolded and that sitting astride him and kissing his nipples might be enough to make him beg.

Another thing: he'd never considered how nice it might be to occasionally make George beg.

They fuck a lot. They fuck hard and joyously, like people who spent a long time waiting.

On a day when it's still raining, he turns his face towards the open window. There's water pooling on the boards and a breeze blowing across his bare shoulders. George's fingers are buried in him to the knuckle, sliding against his prostate, making his hips tremble and jerk. George's other hand is in the small of his back, holding him down. He knows that he could shrug that hand off, but that isn't the point; after so long feeling helpless, David can see the value in even symbolic surrender.

Inside him and still holding him down, George fucks him with long, deep strokes. That first time, in his bed with a plastic boat on the shelf, George had been so gentle that it had been verging on tenative, like he was afraid of hurting David or tipping some scale that neither of them could see. The scale's gone now, all sense of balance destroyed and a sense of starting over. He's less delicate than he used to be. Weakness has been stripped away. He's been tempered by failure. He's finally figured out who he is. And all it took was fucking up so badly and driving all of this way. And finding their way to the sea.

 

*

The world feels cleaner, after the downpour. Out to sea, he can still flickers of electricty in the clouds but, on land, it's cool and clear. He sits barefoot on the porch, his heels against the rail and a pad of paper and he writes a letter to Cat. He tells her about the weather and the black-out and the fact that, soon, the tourists will be here. He's got neat handwriting but he never writes on the lines of the paper. He doodles in the margin. Sometimes, he gives George shit about not writing his own letters but George just says that he wouldn't know what to say and, anyway, George is all over these letters. David would put money on Cat seeing that.

 _It might rain again, later_ , he writes. _It always feels better here, when it rains. Like we could grow more. Like we could change._

George walks out of the house, to the edge of the porch, and stretches both arms up over his head.

*

The letter arrives as Spring is slipping into Summer. It's too early in the day for her to have found treasures. Probably a Sunday or a Monday. She holds it against her heart and imagines them near.

He writes, _There is more than one way to cross a border, darling, and anyone who says you can't come back has misunderstood._


End file.
